HUNTSVILLE, Alabama — The Army wants to include foreign allies in its soon-to-launch online drone marketplace designed for units and service members to acquire equipment and parts, according to Army Secretary Dan Driscoll.
This marketplace will effectively be like a spin-off of Amazon — and the Army is doing this in partnership with Amazon Web Services — in which drone manufacturers proven to be compliant with U.S. regulations can have their products listed on the website for units, both American and foreign, to order directly from the Army. It is expected to go online next month.
The United Kingdom signed an agreement to participate in the program earlier this week, and the Army expects more countries to sign on in the coming months, Driscoll said, but he did not specify which additional allies he expects will join the drone marketplace.
“Just two days ago, with the United Kingdom, we agreed with some protocols for information sharing and what the requirements would be to put things into that marketplace,” Driscoll told the Washington Examiner on Thursday. “And so what we’re hoping to do is to combine all of this into a marketplace that we, our nation, and all the participants in it, and our allies around the world, will be able to start to go rationally buy things.”
“I am cautiously optimistic by summer, we will have launched something that, call it 15-plus nations, will all be able to access and purchase from, which will be a first of its kind,” he said. “It’s hard to overstate how big that can be.”
It comes as the entire military, the Department of Homeland Security, and state and local law enforcement are trying to rapidly introduce and improve their unmanned technology and significantly reduce the time frame to field those weapons, given how quickly the capabilities are adapting.
Other U.S. agencies, such as the FBI and the DHS, and local law enforcement will be able to shop for equipment and components.
Like on Amazon’s website, users will be able to rate and review products.
“Based off of feedback that we get, the same way that you sort of rate things [on Amazon], you’ll see which ones are performing, the competition will drive the prices down, hopefully the quantities will go up,” Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, the commanding general of the Army Aviation Center of Excellence and Fort Rucker, told the Washington Examiner told the Washington Examiner. “Maybe a year from now, that’s not the best drone anymore, we can shift to buying something else.”
This marketplace, which follows a similar strategy developed by Ukraine, will allow units to order drones or spare parts much faster and in smaller quantities, while individual units that have created or made adaptations to their own drones can list them on the site as well.
“There’s a lot of opportunity there for advancement, and we do need maximum flexibility within the confines of how we budget in our government, in our department,” Gill said. “We would like as much flexibility within those line items to be able to shift from a product to another one.”
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The speed with which drone technology is developing is unlike any other development Gill has seen in his career, prompting the changes the Army is leading the whole government through.
“I think we’ve made iterative and incremental adjustments over the course of my career,” Gill said. “The aircraft that we have, we’ve modified them, right? We’ve taken the A model Apache, and we made the D model, and then the D model became the E model. And those were significant leaps ahead in technology, but they weren’t as fast. For us to modify something of that scale in our army, whether it’s an aircraft or a tank, to get it fielded to the entirety of the Army takes 5-10 years, and what we’re talking about doing right now is trying to change what we’re doing in months.”
